The Sorrows by Jonathan Janz

Author:Jonathan Janz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
Published: 2011-12-05T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Three

From the Journal of Calvin Shepherd

June 1st, 1925

I have not the strength to chronicle the phantasmagorical happenings of the past six weeks, nor would I dare to do so had I sufficient energy.

I will, however, for the sake of posterity, record here a few particulars of what has occurred since that awful night, the night I consigned my soul to damnation. That my future readers will find my claims fanciful or even worthy of scorn, I have no doubt. Yet I swear upon my mother’s cold grave that the words written here are free of embellishment or subterfuge. I have no reason to spin yarns—indeed, I have every reason to conceal the truth.

For many days after Henry Mullen and I completed the task of walling Gabriel in the tower, I bade my master to reconsider, once even going so far as to threaten to tear the wall down myself.

A glancing blow to the face and a flurry of remonstrance shattered my resolve. Still, I wept for Gabriel, listened to the continual strains of music that drifted down from the tower, filling me with melancholy and robbing me of both appetite and sleep.

In truth, I deserved far worse.

But, Dear Journal, I must now explain why I fear I will indeed experience worse—why, despite the blackness of my plight, I am plagued by the conviction that all my guilt and self-loathing have been a mere prelude to the real horrors in store for me.

We heard the piano all that first week. This did not surprise me, nor did it increase my anxiety. Conversely, the music I heard emanating from the tower represented my sole source of hope. As long as Gabriel still plays, I told myself, there is still a chance that Robert will see the error of his ways and give the prisoner a reprieve. The vestiges of hope inspired by Gabriel’s playing eventually, I confess, gave way to perplexity, and eventually, to a suffocating dread. For the music persisted through the second week of Gabriel’s entombment.

How, I asked myself, could a man survive so long without food or water? I had heard of rare cases where individuals of uncanny stubbornness and superhuman vigor had lasted up to ten or eleven days without eating or drinking, yet Gabriel’s playing resonated through the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth nights.

Around this time Robert set sail for the mainland, taking with him his grown children and Mullen’s two bereaved daughters. Although my master never explained his motive for embarking on this unscheduled trip, I knew too well why he had gone.

Even a villain as soulless as Robert Blackwood has a breaking point, and I could see plainly that he had reached his. In those last few days and nights preceding his flight, my master had taken to long rambles in the forest, extended examinations of his wine cellar. Even a candlelit excursion to the pit.

Yet wherever he ventured on the island, he could not escape the reach of Gabriel’s piano. The notes originating from

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